Tuesday, December 1, 2009

The last week has contained some interesting back-and-forth on the rollout of the Early Learning Program (full-day kindergarten as it's known to the rest of the world outside government).
Last Wednesday, the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada released a report titled 'The cost of a free lunch-- the real costs of the Pascal early learning plan for Ontario.'
The 'Coles notes' version of the 16-page report goes something like this: the ELP, as proposed by Pascal or as implemented by the government, is horrendously expensive and shouldn't be implemented. Give parents and families that money instead.
It references the Quebec experience, where $5-a-day -- now $7-a-day -- childcare is a reality. While there is no doubt its implementation there was fraught with challenges (and still is), the reliance of the IFMC on this one program as the bad example is troubling. I also found it interesting to note several inaccuracies within the body of the report itself where you can tell the research and writing ended before some of the more detailed information on implementation was made available.
I was also troubled by citations in the report, that when you checked the footnotes, refer to anecdotal information. This doesn't help the credibility of the message.
IFMC also breaks out the alarmist language when referring to the entire 0-12 spectrum of programming and support services, which in and of itself has to be seen as different than full-day kindergarten. That's a spectrum that includes Ontario Early Years Centres, Best Start centres, Parent and Family Literacy Centres, etc. The components Pascal mainly addressed were the introduction of items where there are currently gaps-- such as full-day kindergarten along with before- and after-school programs.
Counter that with the Toronto First Duty phase II research and report (news release, exec summary, full report) released Friday, pointing to the fact that for the implementation of the ELP to work, there are four key things that need to be addressed: an integrated staff team, integrated approaches to early childhood services, integrated service delivery and parent participation.
Most media, from the little I was able to notice on the day of release, focused on the report's notion that early childhood educators need more parity with their kindergarten teacher ELP colleagues if the program is to be a real success.
Meanwhile, Nov. 30 was deadline day for the submission of potential first-year sites to the Ministry of Education-- one that most boards met. It's been interesting to see the news alerts from my chain pop up over the last few days, showing which boards are going public with the sites they've submitted and which aren't. I had one board tell me yesterday they're keeping the list under wraps because they don't want families to switch neighbourhoods to take advantage of a first-year ELP program only to learn in January the government didn't approve that site.

As I've noted in an earlier post, ELP is a great idea fraught with practical implementation issues that weren't considered before the budget was set for it, and the human resources issues accompanying the introduction of a new set of staff into most systems were analyzed. The role of an ECE (members of their own professional college, and at least some of whom have degrees) has to be greater than that of an EA if the program is to achieve the results that accompany it. Presumably the ECEs will have some programming responsibilities, as befits their area of expertise, and will not be merely implementing the program established by the teacher (who has a different area of expertise). Given that many contracts in the province pay EAs at a rate higher than the rate being funded for ECEs, there will be a big funding discrepancy here, and pay equity (rather than bargaining) is likely to be the tool that will determine the eventual pay level. And those boards that do have ECEs in their contracts have so at far higher rates than $19 and change an hour. The issue of class sizes has not been resolved (at least not so far as I can tell from the newspaper coverage), and the sleeper issue as this gets implemented will be facilities and capital costs.In terms of IMFC, their political underpinnings clearly drive their analysis, as does the advocacy work of Jane Bertrand and her colleagues at TFD and Ryerson. If I had to choose between the two, I think the TFD approach has the best chance of producing better lives for children - although I suppose there is an argument that giving families the money would help alleviate child poverty - in which case it should be targetted to children in poverty, not all families, and the services they need should be available for them to purchase with their new found wealth (relatively speaking).

HST? Really? I didn't think there were that many items we weren't already paying both taxes on to generate the hundreds of millions needed. I realize we're both likely being facetious on that CC, and in that statement likely revealed my own personal opinion on it.

Based on what I'm hearing, I think boards will get squeezed— the ministry will find the funds mostly within its existing budgets and force boards to reallocate funding from areas where declining enrolment should be resulting in lower costs and hasn't been. Boards who've avoided significant staffing cuts to their classroom support services are going to face some tough choices. Teachers will be the easy part, since they're auto-allocated per the formulas. It's the other staff positions that aren't as directly linked but whose levels haven't adjusted to lower enrolments who could be under the gun.

I agree with RetDir on the issues of equity and workload. ECEs are likely not going to want to be compared to educational assistants, and will want recognition that lies between that of an EA and teacher. However, to the kids, I don't think any of them notice or give a crap. Certainly, the best schools and classrooms I've witnessed, the classroom teacher, resource teacher, EA and even volunteers seamlessly and effectively work with students and no one sits around complaining about titles and pay grids. Well, not in front of the kids anyway.

I just wrote a long post highlighting the vast differences between my two local boards in the promoting the ELP ER, but when I chose to "publish" the whole thing vanished. Could it be stuck in the filter ER? I don't have time to rewrite it.

Anon 2 Dec. 8:59No filter for it to get stuck in. I've done this before as well, it's a Blogger quirk. If you don't enter the scrambled word and the appropriate posting option (ie: anonymous, sign in), it some times reloads the page and what you typed is gone.

I had listed the differences between how my local public board framed and promoted the ELP compared with the Catholic board.

I swear that if the public board new how it seemed sometimes that the strategy of the Catholic board is to undermine or spin their message counter to the public board, that the public board might pay more attention to how slick it makes the Catholic message and how it leaves the public board looking frazzled and disorganized.